“It’s hard for me to explain, but I think something huge is going on,” Brown said. “It’s not an easy thing. I can’t know these women or their children, I’m just a nobody. But it has increased my faith. I feel like my little part is that I’m keeping that mother and child connected.
“I get to carry books and sit in a chair and listen,” she said softly, “and cry when I go home.”
* * *
ESTABLISHING A STRONG relationship with a parent or a child or a spouse (or with anyone else, for that matter), is not a one-time event. Tempting though it may be to believe otherwise, psychology teaches that an emotional bond isn’t so much an end point as a state of being that we have the power to neglect or enhance.
Sitting together, reading together, focusing on the same story; these are intimate acts that bind us closer to one another. If a relationship is troubled, or if illness or disability or adolescence makes talking awkward—if conversation feels too much like pressure—a shared book can lift everyone up and out of the situation, spanning the difficulty like a bridge.
* * *
DANICA AND ERIC Rommely did not find their way to that bridge until their son Gabe was a teenager. At seventeen months, Gabe had been diagnosed with severe autism. As the years ticked by, he didn’t talk, and he didn’t seem to understand what people were saying around him.
“We read him board books when he was young,” Danica told me, “but he would never sit still, and at some point, when he was a toddler, we thought, screw this, he’s not listening.”
Gabe’s main interest was watching TV shows for little kids. He would watch episodes of Sesame Street, Barney, and Blues Clues over and over, sometimes on several devices at a time. When his parents or caregivers took him to the library, even after adolescence he went straight for the baby books.
“So that’s where I thought we were,” his mother said. “That was his level.”
Except, it turns out, it wasn’t.
* * *
HELLO . . . MEGHAN . . . how are you . . . on this fine afternoon?
The voice belonged to a young therapist named Najla. The words, typed with one finger on a wireless keyboard, were Gabe’s.
He was being funny: it was not a fine afternoon. It was beastly late January, and outside the Rommelys’ house freezing rain was sluicing down, gurgling in the gutters and spattering the leaves.
Everything had changed for the family eighteen months earlier when a therapist introduced Gabe to a system called the Rapid Prompting Method, the mechanism that he and Najla were using when I met them. For the first time in Gabe’s life, he could express himself in full sentences. Until that point, for fourteen years, he had not been able to show that he had been listening, he did have feelings, and though he could not speak, he did have a voice—a voice that was witty, intelligent, and highly self-aware.
As you may imagine, Gabe’s parents were at once stricken with remorse and suffused with gratitude. They now had a chance to get to know their son in a fresh and wonderful way, and he, at last, could express himself despite being trapped in what he has described as the body of “a drunken toddler.”
Danica and Eric began reading to Gabe again. They would sit with him on the sofa, and now, though he might rock or fidget, they knew it didn’t mean he wasn’t paying attention (“Even though I don’t seem to be listening, I am,” he said). A couple of times a week, his therapists would read magazine and newspaper articles out loud to him. His parents chose young adult literature. By the time I met them in the kitchen of their suburban home, they’d read the first book in the Harry Potter series, they’d tried The Hunger Games (“but that kind of fell apart,” Danica said), had devoured Lois Lowry’s The Giver, and were about to embark on The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.
Using the keyboard, with Najla speaking his words at the pace he typed, Gabe explained: I am addicted . . . to . . . screens . . . but there’s nothing . . . I’d love more . . . than to have . . . someone . . . read to me . . . all day long . . . instead.
It is hard to do justice in writing to the poignant pace of our conversation. It was obvious that Gabe had a quick mind, but he could express himself only at the speed of a one finger hitting one key at a time.
I wish I could read . . . on my own . . . but . . . my body doesn’t cooperate.
I asked how Gabe felt, on the inside, when his mother read to him.
It takes me to another . . . place . . . in which I’m . . . completely . . . normal.
Gabe was still typing.
Of course, I love . . . being close to her . . . I experience the world . . . through movies and books . . . to quote a friend.
Najla explained that one of Gabe’s friends, who is also autistic, had used a similar phrase.
It was striking to consider that the same technology that has so many of us in its thrall—the screens and keyboards that dominate our waking hours—has freed a personality that had been trapped and silenced. What memoirist Judith Newman calls “the kindness of machines” has for Gabe given voice to an intellect expanded and nourished by reading aloud.
“Do you have anything to say to parents or families with kids who don’t seem to be paying attention?” I asked him. “Should they keep reading to them anyway?”
Gabe typed.
A . . . million times . . . yes. We are always listening.
* * *
READING TOGETHER CAN do so much important work. It can create connection out of alienation and distance. It can act as a catwalk over the turbulent waters of toddlerhood, and do the same years later in the storms of early adolescence. I’m convinced that reading aloud kept my children closer to me, and to each other, than if we had gone without it. The reading was especially helpful when Paris, my son, was in middle school, that grim epoch when a garrulous young man turns monosyllabic. We didn’t have much in common in those years. He was no longer interested in joining his sisters for story time, but he did want to keep reading with me, provided it was just the two of us. So for a year or so, after Molly had gone to do her homework and I’d tucked the younger girls into bed, Paris and I would meet in my office at home, amid the buttes and canyons of books stacked everywhere.
Sitting side by side on an ancient sofa in a pool of lamplight with the night sky black against the window, we read Conrad Richter’s heartbreaking novel The Light in the Forest, which tells of a white boy raised by the Lenni Lenape who is forced, under a treaty in 1765, to rejoin the settler society he hates. We also read The Underneath, by Kathi Appelt, a novel that coils and seethes and builds to a moment of shocking violence and even more shocking mercy.
A lot was happening in the stories, but I now understand how much must have been happening to us, too. We were awash in neurochemical benefits. Our brains were in neural alignment. We were adding to our shared store of references, characters, and plot twists. And to this day, Paris and I are both aware of those evenings as if they were a solid thing. We built something real between us that rested on a foundation of the years of reading that had begun when he and his sisters were little.
Chapter 4
Turbocharging Child Development with Picture Books
Here’s a little baby
One, two, three
Stands in his crib
What does he see?
—Janet and Allan Ahlberg, Peek-a-Boo!
On the opening page of the Alhbergs’ classic book, a tiny boy in blue pajamas stands upright, hanging on to the top of his crib with one hand. Mouthing the white wooden railing, he reaches with his other hand toward his father, fast asleep and just visible through a circular cutout in the facing page.
“Peek-a-boo!”
Turn the page of the book, and the aperture falls to the left, encircling the baby and revealing what the baby sees: “His father sleeping / In the big brass bed / And his mother too / With a hairnet on her head.”
First published in the UK in 1981 as Peepo!, this cozy rhyming tale traces the events of a baby’
s ordinary, exciting day: waking up before the rest of the family, eating breakfast in a high chair, being taken for a walk, sitting with a toy on a blanket in the park, and being wheeled home for supper, bath, and cuddles before bed. For adults, the book is an exercise in nostalgia, either real or imagined. The family in the book is British, and we can tell that their shabby, cramped row house has limited plumbing. From a portrait of Winston Churchill on the living room wall and from the uniform the father is wearing in the final picture, we know that the story takes place during wartime. It’s clear that after the man kisses his son goodnight, he’s leaving the house and joining his military unit.
Simple in appearance, this Ahlberg favorite is a triumph of complexity. Its delicate, detailed illustrations are full of unspoken prompts for questions and quizzes. There’s depth and texture in the layering of generational perspectives. The verse bounces along, effortlessly imparting meter and rhyme to the child listening. And then there’s the captivating meta-concept of peek-a-boo itself, a game that plays on a child’s developing understanding of the permanence of objects. For a brief and happy period, babies think you really have vanished when you hide behind your hands and chortle with laughter and surprise when you pop back into view. The pleasure of the game lingers well after children have grown out of genuine bewilderment, which gives Peek-a-Boo! an element of nostalgia for toddlers, too.
As the book reminds us, it doesn’t take a lot to fascinate a baby. The little boy in Peek-a-Boo! notices all sorts of things that older, more jaded observers might disregard: pigeons on the wing, a passing dog, “the tassels blowing on his grandma’s shawl.” It may be wartime, but this baby has pretty much everything he needs to thrive. He is surrounded by affectionate family members who play and talk with him. The house may be cluttered, but it’s a place of routine, that unsung virtue of normal life that gives comforting boundaries to the vastness and caprice of the world. Yet for all that, something is missing.
Can you guess what it is? Correct. In the Peek-a-Boo! household, we never see anyone reading to the baby; not his grandma, not his mother or father, not his two attentive, competitive sisters. The child on his mother’s lap who’s looking at the pictures with her and hearing the text read in her voice has, in this respect, a huge advantage over his fictional counterpart.
* * *
READING ALOUD IS good for people of every age, but its effects are perhaps nowhere more keenly felt than in infancy and early childhood. There are good reasons for this, not least the galloping pace of brain growth in a child’s first three years of life. Reading to children during this period gives them more of exactly what they need: more loving adult attention, more language, more opportunities to experience mutual engagement and empathy. Picture books enhance the time parents and children spend together. It’s like adding an extra shot of espresso to a café latte: one cup, extra zing.
And then there is the role that stories play in what the novelist Shirley Jackson called “the nightly miracle.” Bedtime is manifestly sweeter, happier, and nicer when the electronic devices are put away, the books come out, and everyone settles down. A busy day of transactions—spooning cereal (and eating it), washing faces (and being washed), changing diapers (and being changed)—yields to a quiet time of mutual encounter.
An infant won’t know much about any of it, of course. Like the babies in the NICU, he won’t remember hearing about Pat the Bunny or a very hungry caterpillar. He won’t have any trace of a wisp of a recollection of sitting on anyone’s lap and reading Peek-a-Boo! or any other book. Yet long before a baby is old enough to interact, before the first reciprocated smile, before he can control his head, or sit up, or muster the motor skills to “find the mouse” in an illustration, he is drinking in sounds, responding to affection, and, through his brand-new eyes, learning to distinguish one object from another and to see patterns in the world. Hogwarts and the Hundred-Acre Wood are destinations years in the future. But almost from the moment a baby arrives, he’s paying attention. And why not? He has everything to learn.
* * *
IF YOU HAVE ever studied a foreign language—in particular a very foreign one, with letters and sentence structure unlike your own—you may have had the thrilling experience of hearing distinct words emerging from what had once been a fog of indistinguishable syllables. For me, this happened with Japanese, a means of communication so simple that every toddler in Japan can speak it; whereas I, studying the language for two years starting at the age of twenty-nine, was only ever able to muster anodyne and elementary remarks.
Spoken Japanese at first sounded to me like one spectacular run-on sentence. I couldn’t distinguish the end of one word from the beginning of the next, let alone tell which were nouns and which were verbs. But as I practiced and listened, small fragments began to sharpen and catch. Aha, I’d think, that means “river” or “fish” and, wait, that sound isn’t a word at all, it’s a formalized pause, like “um” or “ah.”
The more familiar each of those fragments became, the more capable I was of distinguishing other, different bits. After a time, I could make out distinct chunks of grammar, though I remained unsteady with vocabulary. Had I continued adding to my collection of nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs and exclamations and, when I was adept with those, picked up colloquialisms and idioms and metaphors, well—that would have been subarashii (wonderful!) and insho-teki (impressive, superb, magnificent!). Alas, I didn’t, so it wasn’t. But the experience did give me a taste of what all children undergo in the early years, apart from those who are born with hearing impairments or raised in cruel isolation.
In the beginning, there’s the muffled cacophony of the outside world, a mother’s heartbeat and her reverberating voice. (At least, that is the assumption, as Dr. Abubakar said.) What follows is an extraordinary, seamless process as the amorphous surrounding sounds of a native language separate into syllables, which at some point in the future become discrete words.
“Language comes at us at an incredibly fast pace, and we need to be able to group things together very quickly, otherwise it’s just impossible to understand,” said Morten Christiansen, who runs the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Cornell University. Learning a first language is a complicated developmental exercise that involves isolating sounds and identifying them with meaning, retaining those first conclusions while isolating new sounds and assigning to them yet more meaning, at the same time adding meaning to the existing stock of words. This process, which neurologists call “mapping,” proceeds at two speeds. First comes “fast mapping,” when a child will form a hazy hypothesis of the meaning of a new word. During “extended mapping,” also known as slow mapping, the child incorporates the word into his memory in a more gradual way while refining his understanding of its meaning.
These calculations and adjustments take place at lightning speed all the time a small child is awake and hearing words spoken aloud. “We do know that the amount of exposure to language that kids have really matters,” Christiansen told me. The more speech that a child hears, the greater and earlier his chance of mastering it.
This needs to be understood in a particular way. Ambient talking seems to do little or nothing for babies and toddlers. If two adults stand around talking to one another, the baby in the bassinet is likely to tune them out. What helps babies most is having people speak and read with them, in a responsive way. As one academic observed, “If hearing language was all that mattered, children could be set in front of a television or radio to learn their native tongue.”
They can’t. Babies don’t learn from machines—at least not yet. What millennia of human experience and innumerable modern studies do show is that they learn from us. They need us to pay attention to them, to talk and play and read with them.
* * *
NEWBORN BABIES AND newly hatched songbirds do not look alike. They have something in common, though, apart from being new in the world. They both require instruction. Without a teacher of his own species, a child will not le
arn language, and a songbird will not acquire the distinctive trills of its kind. (In most songbird species, teacher and student also happen to be father and son. Attracting a mate is a signal purpose of warbling. So when an elder zebra finch or white-crowned sparrow teaches a younger one how to sing, he’s literally demonstrating “How I met your mother.”)
Baby birds raised in isolation can’t make up for lessons they missed afterward. “If a bird doesn’t hear the tutor, it will sing,” acceded a researcher at Penn State, “but its song will be nothing like the song of an adult bird. It will be poorly structured and lack the wealth of acoustic structure.”
Something similar happens with human fledglings. To learn the “song” of their species, they need to be brought into the give-and-take of speech. “There’s a lot of language learning that’s social in nature. One of the first things that we learn as children is, actually, the social part of it,” Christiansen said. “Very early on, we learn the normal, it’s-your-turn-it’s-my-turn way of talking. So when their little kids are sort of oohing, parents will ooh back to them, in patterns that are reminiscent of how we communicate when we are talking.”
Infants also learn from seeing expressive human faces, with their thousand-and-one unspoken inflections. What matters for the child’s learning is contingency and responsiveness. Children raised without much of this will learn to communicate, of course, if not as well. A young mind is a thirsty thing. Like a tree growing in Brooklyn, it will draw what sustenance it can, even from chalky soil and a shady setting.
That being said, in recent years we’ve gained a more profound understanding of what babies and children need to thrive from the tragic example of those who were denied it. The 1989 fall of the Communist regime in Romania laid bare that government’s practice of warehousing orphans from infancy onward. Tens of thousands of children were found living in bleak institutions, deprived of affection, stimulation, and personal connection. Babies lay in cribs on their backs, staring up at blank ceilings. Toddlers sat alone in iron cots without toys or books, sometimes tied to the rails so that they would not climb out. Feedings were conducted in silence. During outdoor breaks, adult caregivers spoke to one another, ignoring the children, who milled around without direction or purpose.
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